Ice and Snow
by BaronVladimirHarkonnen
Summary: What happens if instead of Elsa almost killing Anna, it's Anna who kills Elsa? This story began with the idea of a twist on the Creepypasta featuring an undead Anna, but has grown in the concept and in the ambition. This thing will be a multi-chapter story.
1. Some say the world will end in ice

The Utgard Cycle:

**Prologue: **Some say the world will end in fire, others in ice-Robert Frost

The day began like any other in the youth of Princesses Anna and Elsa of Arendelle. They were outside, running around in pleasure in the woods, their father's soldiers keeping watch on them just outside. As they ran and laughed, Elsa understood vaguely in a corner of her mind a sense of strange unease connected with a curious free-standing rock in the forest. It was a very strangely-shaped rock, long but with a pointed edge that stuck out with a sharp end, looking almost glassy. While Anna only remembered a vague sensation of something strange, Elsa heard an occasional rumbling laugh on the winds, a sound deep and inhuman. Almost like ice grinding together.

Anna threw snowballs at her sister, who easily dodged them, and went chasing after her, catching her right next to the rock. Anna, intending to tease Elsa, then pushed her. As she did so, the snow beneath them briefly changed in an unnatural fashion to a slick, smooth ice and Elsa panicked. The ice became more slick and she crashed her head into the rock, blood beginning to pour above one of her eyes. Anna screamed in horror, and rushed to cradle Elsa.

"Elsa, you'll be Ok. Please don't die. I need you sis. I need you. Please, please don't die. Help!"

Elsa looked at Anna uncomprehendingly. One thing she said was very strange and in hindsight rather terrifying but at the time was incomprehensible: "The wind's laughing."

Anna, heedless of her sister's blood on her face and on her dress and in her hair kept screaming for help, when Elsa looked at her again and said, "Why'd you push me?"

"I was just trying to be funny. I thought we were playing on snow. Elsa, I'm so sorry," she was babbling now, sobbing into her sister's body, not realizing that her always-cold sister's motions were slowly starting to lose vitality that her breathing was beginning to slow and rattle in her lungs. Then Anna heard it, too. A weird and strange laughter on the wind, like grinding ice. She almost fancied that the rock was an enormous knuckle of some transformed giant who'd hidden himself in strange woods that had appeared that morning shrouded in frost but the illusion vanished. Instead she held her sister even as her fathers' soldiers ran into the woods.

They tried to take Elsa to the palace but she found herself fighting like a tiger to keep her hands on her sister, to let Elsa know she wasn't going to leave her. She kept babbling strange words, though they heard her, after they'd begun to take her to the palace, trying to stand her up, only for her to pass out on the snow, the snow in front of her turning red in the pattern of a crystal, say "I pushed her on the rock."

They looked and there was indeed a large rock, its pointed edge dyed red. They said nothing to her and she marched back to the palace, wondering why the wind they'd heard earlier had gone silent. A storm like this shouldn't just disappear. Then into the palace, where her parents screamed when they saw Elsa had already bled heavily and was paler than usual. The long hours in her room as doctors were called in. A priest was called in, too, but there was nothing he could do that the doctor hadn't already done. Save, that is, to perform the rite of extreme unction. Praying over her in Latin, Anna was finally allowed in, not understanding why her parents wanted her to be there. When Elsa looked at them, she looked straight at Anna.

She said, "I feel the cold." Her smile was strangely peaceful and then she was still. Her parents sobbed and Anna ran to her, saying "I'm sorry I pushed you sis, I'm so sorry." Her parents, stunned at this, let her cry for a time before pulling her off of her sister's body even as she tried to fight them again. She cried that evening, when they decided that they would quietly bury Elsa in the family graveyard that night, and then gather people for a formal service the next morning. She was not allowed to attend the burial, and she saw the look of anger and hatred in her parents' eyes. She heard then the whispers 'she murdered her own sister,' and was still too young to understand the poison already taking root.

While it had snowed earlier that day, the ground was oddly dry where she was to be buried. Her mother sobbed, saying "She knew. Somehow she, she knew." They buried her then, the Priest reciting his prayers in Latin. Only her father and the soldiers that had found her noticed that the strange stone that had been there in the woods earlier that morning had reappeared outside her grave, no blood now on the sharp edge. That the stone, though the same rock, was at an angle almost like the change of a gigantic flexing finger. As the King turned, he saw something very, very strange. The ground she was buried in had been brown before the burial. Now it was almost pure, transparent ice. The ice around it formed a pattern like an enormous snowflake. Then the King saw that same stone had seemed to shift again, moving just outside the pattern of one of the prongs of the snowflake even though it would been right through one of them in its original position.

It was twilight, then, after a long afternoon in her room, alone, when Anna had a strange vision she could not explain, be it sorcery or some strange thing of the old Gods. Her sister's grave-site and the woods changed. An enormous gigantic hand that was a deep blue reached into the Earth, seemingly immaterial and called out her sister. In that hand she was like a speck, and there were strange red things. A voice spoke in an eerie tone, the grinding ice from before. The shroud twitched, and then she saw, for a moment, through Elsa's own eyes.

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_What is this? _Her body was covered in some strange white thing, but what it rested on felt odd. She, mistress of the Ice and Snow, was not used to feeling cold. Yet here it felt as though she rested in ice. Wind, then. From nowhere. It blew and the white thing covering her was gone. Her face….the blood that had blinded her left eye was gone. The thing that she rested in was not soil, it was an enormous hand, one that she looked and saw was surrounded by many others on prodigiously long arms, each as long as it was. Then she looked up and saw fifty monstrous faces, some leering, some frowning, others with ear to ear grins of fanged teeth.

The giant that held her then turned north and blackness swallowed her, even as fear caused there to be a rumble from the being when ice dug into its flesh and produced a strange silvery substance…

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The servants had found her twitching and crying for Elsa, and her parents came in and yelled at her. They told her that she had killed her own sister, that she'd never see Elsa again. They didn't use that murderer word, but they might well as had. Her own sister, her dearest friend, and she was no more. What was she going to do?

It was a long and sleepless night in the palace that night. But as the Royal Family was asleep in the wee small hours of the morning on the night of a full moon, clear and cloudless, the snow that had fallen earlier that day calm and waiting, a strange wind began to howl and snow began to blow in a fashion like a blizzard. The howling awoke Anna, who cried and moaned her sister's name, and it awoke her parents who looked at each other in fear. It was a strange sound, the moreso because the moon still shone brightly on the snow, the stars in the heavens gazing down heedlessly on a white and quiet world.

A foul light arose in the midst of the blizzard, in the graveyard where the Kings and Queens of Arendelle were buried. It glowed a bright and sickly blue, almost as bright as the Sun. Night became day, roosters crowed, and the palace awoke. The wind howled now in a fashion almost cruel, beating at the doors of the palace, whistling under doors and making the inhabitants shiver. The light seemed to fade, and then the servants who were already awake and clutched swords crept up to the palace. It was strange, they reflected, that there almost seemed something like a mixture of ice and snow creeping through the floor, beneath the door and its frame, crawling up them in a sadistic fashion. As it did so, it seemed to form a hand and the door opened.

Screams stalked the palace, as a strange figure walked through it, heading toward Anna's door. As the screams said, "It's going for the princess!" the King and the Queen ran to her door, and wrapped their arms around her. The Queen's face was white, as she had seen…it. A strange and lilting sing-song voice echoed through the silent halls, shivering teeth, and whimpering courtiers:

"An-na, do you want to build a snowman? Come on let us go and play, I never see you any more. Come out of the door, it's like you've gone a-way," echoing in the palace. The cruel voice of winter danced here, in a strangely resonant fashion. It was as though countless voices and the winds of previous winters echoed in the silent palace.

"An-na, it's like you've gone away, we used to be best of buddies and now we're not. I wish you would tell me why? Do you want to build a snowman? It doesn't have to be a snowman?"

The thing stood before the Princess's door and knocked. It knocked with the force of snow falling from a roof.

"Come out, sister dear. You dashed my head against the rock, but I live anew. Come out, come out, let us play together."

If this had been Anna, the grave had already been unkind. The being that knocked seemed entirely constructed of a blue translucent ice that glowed in the moonlight, balefire eyes glowing from empty sockets. Her face was deformed, the lower jaw extending with vaguely fang-like teeth protruding, and an enormous bulby nose. Her hands were somewhat larger and her proportions somewhat simian. No ears were visible.

Elsa knocked.

"Do you want to build a snowman? It doesn't have to be a snowman!"

She knocked all the night, but in the morning she seemed to fade. The icy howling wind was gone, but cold burns were seared into the palace, cold burns in the shape of the feet of a young girl barefoot in the snow. White-faced, only Anna heard her soft response: "I want to build a snowman…"


	2. Fimbulwinter

Time's Current:

Now thirteen, Anna no longer did anything but shut herself in her room, talking to her paintings about the strange monster that haunted the palace at night. The second night that thing had shown up in her sister's form, her family had attempted to send soldiers of the palace against it, and they had died frozen in place with horrifying impressions on their faces, which were distorted in a form not like that any man's face had hitherto seen. She grew up isolated, haunted by a nightly refrain that she was a murderer whom had slain her sister but her sister had returned from the grave still loving her, still wanting to play. She had heard, too, that winters were growing progressively longer and that there were monstrous forms to be seen during the day, even as the Palace was forever frozen and haunted by a demon in the nighttime. Such was the desperation this monstrous undead thing produced that priests had been sent to exorcise it, but the demon turned to them and spoke in an abomination's voice:

"Who are you, creeping men of a crucified godling, to tell me that I may not behold mine own kin?" And then they, too, were frozen, but their faces were malformed still further. Blue, eyes of ice and glass, mouths torn forever in a silent scream, hands clutching crucifixes frozen in ice that shattered when they, too, were broken and taken away. Eight years of madness at night, eight winters that had befallen her and her kingdom in sinister power and devastating force. It was worst, too, that her parents distinctly believed that she had killed her own sister from malice before the monster came, but after it, they raised her to be a princess, to be sure, but their own daughter? Not at all. The people gave her credence, to be sure, but it was pro forma. If a suitable leader from another society came, their dynasty was overthrown. She knew it, they all knew it.

Which was why there had been such disquiet and consternation when the Fjord froze over entirely during the last winter, which had distinctly begun earlier and seen longer, harder frosts and more reports of rumbling like the breath of giants and thunder on days marked only by strange blizzards that appeared and disappeared like smokescreens behind which monsters hid. A force from the Southern Isles had appeared, armed men clad in plate armor, equipped with the finest weaponry that noble blood could buy. Fivescore and seven they dared winters where stalked monsters, fivescore and seven they had died and their ship splintered by something that left what might have been burn marks were it a weapon of fire and smoke but instead left frozen traces of ice in crystalline fractals. One of them, the youngest Prince of the Islands, wrote in frozen congealed blood still on his fingers "It saw u-", his face marked with terror and his body left him half the man he would otherwise have been.

Around the strange ship marooned in ice there were enormous footprints, vaguely like those of men in armor but with hints of abnormality far beyond the enormous size. She remembered like it was yesterday the stammering report of an ice-trader whom she was sweet on that "there was something in that blizzard, Sire. It was a giant. Blue, brow furrowed like an arched mountain, beard clear white. It raised a great club and smashed that ship dozens of time with no ill effects. What manner of being it was I cannot state, only that when it appeared in clear, the blizzard suddenly halted with the snow frozen in midair and then resealed around it when the ship was destroyed. They did manage to fire two cannons at it, but the cannons did not damage the monster, only made it mad."

He looked desperately at the King, "Sire, I know of trolls. But what of giants? If these things be real, what else of old stories our pagan ancestors foretold might not also be real? Is not your palace itself haunted by a wight, some damned hellspawn of the abyss raised by a force beyond our understanding?"

Growling in displeasure, the King said, "You have our royal leave to be the Palace Ice-Trader, Kristoff. Do not taunt us further with these heretical thoughts, be they truth or untruth." Anna, sitting very silent, had heard tones of menace in her father's voice when she had sought to speak and had become very silent. That evening, the monster came as usual, or so it seemed, but then there were rumbling sounds that were very loud and primordial. A giant's breathing might have been like this, and a few hardy souls gazed and reported enormous subhuman monstrosities that lumbered and moved about in the wilderness, and that the monster had fallen silent upon seeing them and knelt before them. These reports were dismissed for their strangeness and partiality to the princess as lese majeste and their authors sentenced to death by exposure.

Eight years of such a Spartan and unfamiliar existence, hearing such sniveling toads as the Duke of Weselton calling her to her face "A murderer of her own kin, and your intended heir. How then are we to trust any kingdom which allows such a being to be there? Even if her kin was a witch, she deserved a kinder fate than slaying of kin by kin." Her father had snarled and thrown the Duke out by hurling a goblet at him.

It was that incident, yesterday, which made the Princess finally decide on a very desperate gamble. She had heard of the appearance of a tall and one-eyed figure who was deemed a strange prophet by some and a pagan heretical sorcerer by others. This was Mr. Draugadrottin and his seeming aid/lover (so said some darker whispers) Mr. Mjolnir. Tall and in grey was Mr. Draugadrottin, his head covered by a tall blue hat, using a strange staff that was said in some lights of the Moon to become a spear of Otherworldly nature, and that on such instances he became very tall and eldritch indeed. A strange instinct told her that if anyone could explain the nature of the monstrosity that sought her, Draugadrottin would be that one.

So that morning she had eluded palace guards all too happy to let her go, hoping that the first snows of winter would slay her and perhaps that with her disappearance, so too would go the monster. It was a cold and a harsh day, and so she went to her sister's grave. It was a strange place, haunted by an ice that had yielded to no summer, and an ice that was dark and opaque at that. The Wight, she reflected, must not have been something of flesh, for the ice was very powerful indeed and did not produce a sliding effect like normal ice.

Kneeling down, she put a gloved hand on the soil where the strange ice intersected with normal, hardy topsoil tilted by farmers.

"Odd. Why is this ice different from all other ice?" As she looked out, she then saw that the day was clear, before hearing a howling gale and watching as a blizzard came forth and with it a set of tremendous booms. Doom-Doom. It was as though two enormous drums were hit in succession, her hands at her ears, tears freezing on her face as she sought in vain to drown a tremendous and awful sound. Doom-Doom. With it a rumbling as though a monster breathed, and within it a hint of an enormous form that carried what seemed like a shield and a colossal pike, and icy armor. Then a voice that spoke in a rumbling power in a tongue of no decent human origin, less speech and more the crashing sound of ice cracking on a thawing river. What it said, she did not know. Only that it was speech and of a very strange sort at that. The cold was so powerful that she fell asleep, a sleep that lasted all the day though it seemed a timeless hour at most on a strangely cold and clear afternoon when a girl fell asleep by a tomb unmarked by others save in scorn and contempt.

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The Citadel of Utgard, Northern Karelia:

"How was the patrol?" Ymir asked Vargr, who had just returned from his journey near the castle.

"Uneventful as usual. Not a damned bit of action since we showed up and annihilated that measley little wooden thing, and I'm frankly put rather tired of this. I expected that a combat deployment would see more combat."

"Orders are orders. If you would like to tell Loki that we're to do whatever it is we please, you're welcome to it. You know as well as I do that we're going to pulverize these dirt-things whenever we move out. You know as well as I do that Midgard is as large as any other world and that it will take time to finish amassing our resources, and that this time is almost done. You spend eight years waiting for this to happen, and you bitch every single night, and you know what? I'm sick of hearing you bitch. So shut up and deal with having to wait like the rest of us."

Vargr snarled and then put his pike in the arsenal and armory and then sat down to enjoy his meal. As he did so, his gaze turned to the frightened draug with golden hair who was suspended above them both.

"Why's she up in the air?"

"Gandalf and his little helpers are coming along for a little visit this evening and they want to start by having her up in the air and seein' 'em up close."

"Dwarves. Nasty little buggers. I hate those assholes."

"Not all of 'em are small, though. Gandalf's the size of an Alf or a Human."

"They're all small to us, so what difference does it make?"

As Vargr gnawed on a leg of dragon, he said "Nothing."

His superior smiled and slapped him on the back. Above them, Elsa trembled in fear and her growing strength unconstrained by the raw power of the Draug that she now was caused Castle Utgard to tremble on its foundations. The Jotnar stopped for a second.

"Is she one of us?" the question was from a newly-assigned private in the infantry, just-arrived in the Castle.

"No, she's human. What she is, we don't know. That she is, we do know, which is why she's now a Draug incapable of escaping us."

"And the rumors of this 'Draugadrottin?' What exactly are we to do if 'Draugadrottin' is ol' One Eyed Monster himself?"

"Bite your tongue, you little prick. We don't want the monster in question to come if called and you know as well as I do that those things do."

"Yes sir." For the rest of the day, the Jotnar said very little in the mess hall even as the Palace trembled several times as Elsa sought to free herself. Slowly and by degrees, her imprisonment did weaken, only to see her fear worsen when eight monsters appeared. In semblance they were akin to men, but in semblance very vaguely. Their skin was a withered parchment-like structure, even in the form of the tall man-sized figure with a long, whispy beard. He walked with scepter and then said, "Human who emulates the great Jotnar, you know here who I am. For our pleasure, I enumerate my companions. Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Balin, Dwalin, and Thorin, and I am Gandalf, King of the Dwarves!"

In fear she screamed as Gandalf spoke a few Words of Power in the phrase of Svartalfheim, the Dwarf-Home, and the ice cracked and she fell to her knees before smiling monsters. She hated these things, but never more when they held her in their power and used their devices to see within her, to take from her the very thing that made her who and what she was for their own amusement, to remake her greatest gift in their image and in their likeness….

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Anna awoke. It was nighttime. She was outside the palace. The monster was soon to be present. So, too, was it. It formed in the evening out of thin air, vapors melding upon vapors in a brilliant gleaming light that left the impression of a figure initially very tall and blue but not like that of a man. In fear, she saw the creature assume a form like her sister, but deformed, whitish skin with deep dark eyes black as the Void of night, fanged teeth turning to her:

"Anna darling, you've come out to play!"

Run, she heard a voice speak on the wind, and she ran. She ran and it seemed like something magical saved her from the grasping hands and taunting voice of a monster that loped after her with a movement and gait not unlike that of a canine, arriving on the palace steps and pounding desperately on the doors. It seemed that none would let her in until the door opened and she fell within, as the monster leapt in after her only for a sonorous and rumbling voice to speak in an inhuman tongue that was strangely beautiful, like and yet unlike the tongue of the Sagas. It spoke at many levels, but a staff appeared illuminated by light as it transformed into a spear that was hurled into a monster that shrieked and writhed and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

"Who are you?" she asked as the spear returned and became a staff. She saw three figures. One a tall man in grey cloak with a blue hat, one-eyed, a long beard and extending to her a hand that she took as she stepped up.

"Call me Draugadrottin. This is Mjolnir, my batman, and to the right is Farbautison, my priest and confidant. I am the one some deem a prophet and others a herald of doom from another time. I offer you aid."

It was then that her parents came and Draugadrottin stood before them and spoke in an imperious voice that led to all of the palace's inhabitants groveling before them:

"The monster that haunted your nights is slain! Grant to me one night's rest in your halls, and tomorrow a mystery of eight years shall be solved as they become nine, and three shall journey to the root of this mystery and vanquish the long sorrow of nine years!"

And all obeyed though none could escape the wonder that came into their hearts at their voice, nor the brief impression that a man with a grey beard and a blue hat with one eye had just commanded hundreds to obey him without so much as a single word of command. And indeed, for the first time in eight years, all slept soundly though none understood why the first rest in so many years left them still more deeply uneasy than already they were…


End file.
